Troubling Freedom

Antigua and the Aftermath of British Emancipation

Natasha Lightfoot
Troubling Freedom
 Troubling Freedom

antigua and the aftermath

of british emancipation

Natasha Lightfoot

duke university press

Durham and London 2015
 © 2015 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States
of America on acid-free paper ∞
Typeset in Quadraat by Westchester Publishing Ser vices

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lightfoot, Natasha, [date] author.
Troubling freedom : Antigua and the aftermath of
British emancipation / Natasha Lightfoot.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-8223-5975-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-8223-6007-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-8223-7505-0 (e-book)
1. Slaves—Emancipation—Antigua and Barbuda—Antigua.
2. Slaves—Emancipation—Colonies—Great Britain.
3. Antigua—Race relations—History. I. Title.
f2035.l54 2015
305.800972974—dc23 2015020931

Cover art: Moravian Church Mission, St. John’s Street

(ca. 1830). Aquatint by Johann Stobwasser, Ansichten von
Missions-Niederlassungen der Evangelishen Bruder-Gemeinde
(Basle, n.d.). Courtesy of the John Carter Brown
Library at Brown University.
to the people of antigua & barbuda

& for my sons

 contents

illustrations ix ac know ledg ments xiii

introduction
“Me No B’longs to Dem”: Emancipation’s
Possibilities and Limits in Antigua 1

chapter 1
“A Landscape That Continually Recurred in Passing”:
The Many Worlds of a Small Place 21

chapter 2
“So Them Make Law for Negro,
So Them Make Law for Master”: Antigua’s 1831
Sunday Market Rebellion 57

chapter 3
“But Freedom till Better”:
Labor Struggles after 1834 84

chapter 4
“An Equality with the Highest in the Land”?
The Expansion of Black Private and Public Life 117

chapter 5
“Sinful Conexions”: Christianity,
Social Surveillance, and Black Women’s Bodies
in Distress 142
 chapter 6
“Mashing Ants”: Surviving the
Economic Crisis after 1846 167

chapter 7
“Our Side”: Antigua’s 1858 Uprising and
the Contingent Nature of Freedom 195

conclusion
“My Color Broke Me Down”:
Postslavery Violence and Incomplete Freedom
in the British Caribbean 224

notes 233 bibliography 287 index 309

viii contents
 illustrations

Map 0.1 Present-Day Map of Antigua x

Map 0.2 Present-Day Map of the Caribbean Region xi
Map 1.1 Map of St. John’s (ca. 1840) 36

Fig. 1.1 Map of Antigua (1775) 24

Fig. 1.2 Map of Barbuda and Antigua (1842) 32
Fig. 1.3 Moravian Church Mission, St. John’s Street (ca. 1830) 37
Fig. 1.4 Long Street Courthouse (1823) 40
Fig. 1.5 Mill Yard on Gamble’s Estate, St. John Parish (1823) 42
Fig. 1.6 Ruin of a sugar mill on Rooms Estate, St. Philip’s Parish
(2009) 43
Fig. 4.1 Hyndman’s Village, St. John Parish (1914) 125
 CARIBBEAN AT L A N T I C
SEA OCEAN

St.
GEORGE Fitches
Creek
St. John’s Bay
N

St. JOHN Parham

Five Islands
Harbour St. PETER
Nonsuch
Bay
All Saints
St. PHILIP
St. MARY
Freetown
Liberta
St. PAUL
Willoughby
English Bay
Harbour

Falmouth
Harbour 0 1 2 3 mi

0 1 2 3 4 5 km

map 0.1. Present-day map of Antigua. Map by Bill Nelson Cartography.

 Bermuda
FLORIDA

GULF OF
MEXICO AT L A N T I C
Bahamas OCEAN
N

Cuba Turks and Caicos Islands

Dominican Virgin Islands, U.S.

MEXICO Republic Virgin Islands, British
Cayman
Islands Haiti Anguilla
Jamaica Puerto Rico Saint Martin
Saint Barthélemy
BELIZE Saba Antigua and Barbuda
Saint Eustatius Guadeloupe
Saint Kitts and Nevis
CARIBBEAN SEA Montserrat Dominica
HONDURAS Martinique
Saint Vincent Saint Lucia
Aruba Curaçao
NICARAGUA and the Grenadines
Barbados
Bonaire
Grenada

Trinidad and
COSTA RICA PANAMA Tobago

V E N E ZUE L A

GUYANA
C O L O MBIA SURINAME

0 300 mi

0 500 km BR A ZI L

map 0.2. Present-day map of the Caribbean region. Map by Bill Nelson Cartography.
 ac know ledg ments

Many people played integral parts in making this book happen to whom
I am eternally grateful. I only have the space to thank some (apologies
for not remembering everyone), but know that I treasure all of you who
helped me in big and small ways on the journey.
I must first thank those behind the incredible training that I have re-
ceived as a historian, first as a still-unsure undergraduate at Yale, where
Glenda Gilmore saw the scholar in me before I even did, and then at
nyu, where I came to intellectual maturity in the hands of so many skill-
ful mentors. The exemplary scholarship and thoughtful insights of my
advisor, Ada Ferrer, moved my research along through many stages; her
work continues to inspire me. Michael Gomez provided a welcome, eye-
opening space for all his students to think critically about the African
diaspora as a frame for our work. The incredibly kind Sinclair Thom-
son made a lasting mark on my thinking with his extensive knowledge
of popular resistance. My endless gratitude goes to the brilliant Jennifer
Morgan for her pathbreaking scholarship and sage advice. I am indebted
to her in too many ways, and still learn from her daily. The anthropolo-
gist Constance Sutton reframed how I see the Caribbean. I treasure her
teaching and the many life lessons she has shared with me. Also many
thanks to past and current nyu faculty whose presence was transfor-
mative for my scholarship, including the consummate scholar Martha
Hodes; Robin Kelley, with whom a few minutes of conversation changed
my approach to everything; and Barbara Krauthamer, who taught me
how to teach.
nyu faculty offered me great guidance, but my fellow graduate stu-
dents made me smarter every day I worked alongside them. Thanks to
Tanya Huelett, Aisha Finch, Edwina Ashie-Nikoi, Brian Purnell, Sherie
Randolph, Marc Goulding, Maxine Gordon, Peter Hudson, Njoroge
Njoroge, Rich Blint, Erik McDuffie, Derek Musgrove, Harvey Neptune,
Melina Pappademos, Yuko Miki, Marcela Echeverri, Laurie Lambert,
Mireille Miller-Young, Maggie Clinton, and Sherene Seikaly, among
others, for always raising my bar.
My work was undertaken at many different archives, whose incred-
ibly gracious staffs deserve thanks, including the National Archives of
Antigua and Barbuda (especially the past archivist Marian Blair and the
late Noval Lindsay), the British National Archives at Kew, the School of
Oriental and African Studies Archives, the Schomburg Center for Re-
search in Black Culture, the American Antiquarian Society, the Moravian
Church Archives (many thanks to Paul Peucker), and the Yale University
Divinity School Archives. In addition, thanks to the several institutions
that helped to fund my research, including New York University; the
Tinker Foundation; the American Antiquarian Society Peterson Fel-
lowship; Yale University’s Gilder-Lehrman Center for the Study of Slav-
ery, Resistance, and Abolition; the Ford Foundation; the Schomburg
Center’s Scholars-in-Residence Program; and numerous centers at Co-
lumbia University, including the Department of History, the Institute for
Research in African-American Studies, the Institute for Latin American
Studies, the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, and the Center
for the Study of Social Difference.
I truly appreciate my fellow historians at Columbia University, in-
cluding Christopher Brown, Mae Ngai, Eric Foner, Celia Naylor, Samuel
Roberts, Barbara Fields, Betsy Blackmar, Alice Kessler-Harris, Pablo
Piccato, and Karl Jacoby, all of whom have been dedicated mentors to
me, as well the endless intellectual energy of many graduate students,
including Katherine Johnston, Wes Alcenat, Yesenia Barragan, Nick
Juravich, and Megan French-Marcelin. Thanks to my undergraduate re-
search assistants, Gaia Goffe and Brandon Thompson, who helped me
move through centuries-old records much more quickly than I would
have on my own. Beyond my department I have to thank the Columbia
and Barnard faculty with whom I have found intellectual community,
including Farah Griffin, Saidiya Hartman, David Scott, Kaiama Glover,
Alondra Nelson, Mabel Wilson, Tina Campt, Yvette Christianse, Jean
Howard, the incomparable Kim Hall, and my sister-scholar Carla Shedd.
My work is all the better because of the work and insights of many
other scholars. I cherish Mark Naison for his unwavering and fierce sup-
port of my scholarship since my days at Fordham. Paget Henry introduced

xiv ac know ledg ments

me and my research in its earliest iterations to a wonderful community
of Antiguan and Barbudan intellectuals. I value his mentorship. Susan
Lowes has been a model researcher and true friend. I must also thank
Milton Benjamin, Mali Olatunji, Ellorton Jeffers, Ermina Osoba, Marie
Elena John-Smith, Edgar Lake, Robert Glen, and Dorbrene O’Marde for
their work on Antiguan and Barbudan history and culture. Thanks as well
to fellow scholars of the African diaspora whose research continues to in-
spire me and whose insights have significantly improved my work, includ-
ing the ever-generous Herman Bennett, as well as Melanie Newton, Diana
Paton, Rosanne Adderley, Bridget Brereton, Marisa Fuentes, Lara Putnam,
Gad Heuman, Mimi Sheller, Tera Hunter, Martha Jones, Mia Bay, Barbara
Savage, Denise Challenger, Ben Talton, Michael Ralph, Vanessa Perez-
Rosario, Hlonipha Mokoena, and the lovely Natasha Gordon-Chipembere.
Additionally my sincere gratitude goes to Gisela Fosado, Ken Wissoker,
and the staff at Duke University Press for bringing this book to fruition. I
also have undying praise and awe for Grey Osterud, a magician of the writ-
ten word, who helped this book make sense. If you enjoy the read it is as
much to her credit as it is to mine.
I have too many friends to name who supported my work and some-
times offered welcome distractions from it, but some deserve special
mention. My best friend of more than twenty years, Damaris De Los San-
tos, and her entire family are my surrogate family. No words encapsulate
what her friendship means to me. Tanya Huelett makes me laugh while
changing how I see the world. She is my kindred spirit. Only for brevity’s
sake will I list others who I cannot imagine myself without: Victor Vil-
lanueva, Risa Rich, Najah Mustafa, Vanessa Fitt, Christine Rocco, Carlos
Santiago, Desiree Gordon, Ryan Jean-Baptiste, and my sons’ West Coast
aunts, Erica Edwards and Deb Vargas.
My family has loved and encouraged me all along the way. My extended
family at St.  Andrew’s Episcopal Church in the Bronx will always hold
a special place in my heart. The Swain and Gardenhire families have
brought good food and good laughs into my life. The Lightfoot, Carr, and
James families and their many branches in Antigua, New York, Canada,
and the UK deserve so much more than thanks for their unending love
and support. I am honored to be a part of them. I hold dear the memories
of my late grandparents, Irene and William Carr and Mildred Bernard;
they are my direct connection to the working people who fill the pages
of this book. My sister, Michelle Lightfoot, is my greatest champion. My

ac know ledg ments xv

aunts Heather Henry, Donnamae Carr, and especially Gwynneth Carr
have always been my second mothers. I miss my late father, William
Lightfoot, and his brilliance, his politics, and his sharp fashion sense.
I hope the best parts of him live on in me. My mother and first teacher,
Jocelyn Lightfoot, is my greatest inspiration. I will always be in her debt.
Matthew Swain’s love brings me joy. I cherish the life we have built to-
gether. This book is for our children, Evan and Avery, who make my heart
sing.

xvi ac know ledg ments

 introduction

“me no b’longs to dem”

Emancipation’s Possibilities and Limits in Antigua

Antigua’s thirty thousand enslaved people, alongside those in all other

British colonial territories, were freed on August 1, 1834. Shortly after
emancipation, Juncho, an elderly black Antiguan woman previously en-
slaved on MacKinnon’s Estate in the Parish of St.  John, described the
differences between slavery and freedom.1 The very moment of freedom
rendered Juncho both jobless and homeless. Abolition ended her daily
toil in the fields but undermined her material security. Since 1834, she
had lived in poverty with her daughter. Juncho declared: “So you see . . . 
dat make me say me no [love] slabery. Now wen me [young], me hab to
work hard, hab dig cane [h]ole, weed cane, pick grass, do ebery ting; but
now me ole, and no able to work, dey take away me house, ’cause me no
b’longs to dem, but den me [know] me free, and me bless God me am
free.”2
Juncho insisted that, despite the hunger and privation she encoun-
tered in freedom, slavery had been worse. She mentioned examples of
two harrowing situations that as an enslaved mother she typically faced.
She could not nurse a sick child back to health because she was required
to toil in the fields all day. When her child transgressed a rule of the
plantation, she had to watch, powerless to intervene, as the owner tied
Juncho’s child to a tree and meted out a violent whipping. In Juncho’s
account, freedom relieved the sorts of stresses on the mother-child re-
lationship that being the property of another often involved. The im-
poverishment she endured while living with her daughter and several
grandchildren, however, attests to other kinds of stresses black families
encountered after 1834.
 The striking utterance “me no b’longs to dem” signals that she took
solace in the self-mastery that legal freedom brought. As a freedwoman,
she had control of her body and her time. Reportedly, Antigua’s freed-
people used the phrase “me free, me no b’longs to you!” as a “constant
boast” when they ignored or defied whites.3 The phrase also evokes black
women’s relief at the freedom to protect their bodies from sexual viola-
tion. Juncho and her formerly enslaved compatriots relished their new
status and the liberty to express it publicly to all whites within earshot.
Yet Juncho’s story, rather than hailing abolition as an unalloyed bless-
ing, also underlines the many difficulties that black working people faced
following their legal release from enslavement. She explained: “It true
me better off den dan me am now, for since me free, me no get much;
sometimes me no eat bread all day, for me daughter hab so many pic’nees
(children) she no able to gib me much; but . . . me [know] God gib me
free, and slabery is one bad something sometimes.”4 Juncho admitted
that some aspects of her circumstances in bondage proved better than
those she experienced in freedom. As a slave, she had access to her own
house and a private garden, where she grew produce and raised poultry.
When emancipation came, her then-former owner expelled her from
her home and reclaimed her provision ground as his own. Too old to
be employed profitably, she became a liability in this new regime of
wage labor.
Her words poignantly convey the paradox of freedom for ex-slaves.
Emancipation from chattel status into poverty and continued subjugation
meant that freedom, while long awaited and celebrated, entailed material
distress and personal uncertainty. Her story also highlights the particular
difficulties of freedom for Antigua’s black women, who faced an unreli-
able labor market that favored black men, while the women shouldered
responsibility for their children and extended kin, often without assis-
tance from male partners. Essentially, these inadequacies meant that
freedpeople similar to Juncho had to imbue freedom with deeper mean-
ing through new social, political, and ontological struggles.
Her testimony reveals that self-ownership marked only the beginning
of such struggles. Freedpeople were still poor and bereft of the resources
required to improve their material and social circumstances. Their con-
tinued efforts were central to the lived experience of emancipation. This
book tells the story of how Antigua’s black working people struggled to
realize freedom in their everyday lives, both before and after slavery’s

2 introduction
legal end, as well as the transformative nature of their many letdowns
and few triumphs along the way.

An Unfinished Freedom

Troubling Freedom explores how newly emancipated women and men de-
fined freedom by tracing its uneasy trajectory in Antigua over nearly
three decades. After an overview of the island in the nineteenth century,
the book moves to a slave rebellion in 1831 that foreshadowed emancipa-
tion’s complexities. It continues by chronicling freedpeople’s quotidian
survival tactics from 1834 through the 1850s, and it closes with an 1858
labor riot that reinforced freedom as an incomplete victory. Studies of
freedom in former slave societies throughout the Atlantic World fre-
quently posit emancipation as the start of black people’s labor organiz-
ing and pursuit of political rights.5 Framing short-term strategies after
slavery within the long-term struggle to obtain political and economic
citizenship is vitally important, but it tells only part of freedom’s story.
The moments just after slavery’s end, flooded with chaos and uncer-
tainty for both former slaves and masters, formed a critical juncture that
begs closer examination. In this time of flux, both groups made fitful
attempts to configure distinct practices of freedom, which bore stark
differences that triggered clashes between them for decades afterward.
Impoverished and illiterate freedpeople just emerging from bondage
may have held far-reaching goals, but they were in no position to make
drastic changes to their new status. Still, they conceived of a freedom that
granted them ownership over their bodies and their time, autonomy in
their labor, enjoyment of their leisure, and legal and economic inclusion
in society—if not as equals with their erstwhile enslavers, then at least as
protected subjects. Furthermore, historians have argued that there were
greater political and economic constraints among freedpeople in small
islands such as Antigua, because freedpeople’s universally blocked access
to land immediately forced them into underpaid plantation labor.6 While
indeed their landlessness constrained freed Antiguans, this book compli-
cates that sweeping narrative by highlighting their myriad efforts to de-
fine and expand their freedom in the face of such constraints. I ask how,
despite being mired in poverty, subject to coercion, and denied even the
most basic rights at every turn, freedpeople still found spaces in their
ordinary lives to feel free.7

introduction 3
 Freedpeople had to carve out their own forms of liberation. De-
spite unyielding obstacles, black working people practiced their freedom
through struggles to claim space, uphold community, acquire property,
and reorganize their time and labor. I have found that ordinary encoun-
ters not only between blacks and whites but also among black people
evidenced the transformative impact of emancipation in their daily lives.
Freedpeople’s interactions within and beyond the plantation workplace—
such as intermittent strikes, independent provisioning and marketing,
the simultaneous practice of obeah and Christianity, efforts to educate
themselves and their children, public socializing and amusements, and
the founding of all-black villages in Antigua—all show the many con-
testations over freedom’s multiple meanings. Freedpeople’s practices
of leisure, forms of spirituality, family relationships, and new modes of
consumption complemented their struggles against the colony’s elites to
assert their senses of freedom. Their quotidian survival strategies fed
into black working people’s rare yet revelatory moments of collective
and violent public protest.8
Everyday life among black working people manifests the dynamics
of British emancipation most profoundly, making plain the disruptions,
possibilities, and failures wrought by freedom.9 Through their daily ex-
periences, freedpeople honed their ideas about freedom, making the
exploration of ordinary life critical to our understanding of freedom’s
complexities. Black working people’s quotidian acts reveal that, despite
being legally free, constant efforts were still necessary to secure and
expand their material resources, their autonomy, and their sense of
community. Prior to the genesis of formal, institutionalized modes of
political and economic struggle, everyday life in postslavery Antigua was
the laboratory for black working people’s politics.
Existing histories of the transition to freedom in the Atlantic World
do critical intellectual work to define freedom, to expose its inconsis-
tencies when juxtaposed with citizenship as a concept and a practice in
former slave societies, and to reflect on existing racial, gender, and class
hierarchies that abolition’s passage built on and exacerbated. These sto-
ries have framed freedpeople’s efforts to give freedom meaning within
a well-known dialectic of communal unity and consistent opposition to
unsympathetic state structures and hostile former owners. I trace black
working people’s efforts to achieve a more meaningful freedom by rein-
terpreting a variety of ordinary acts that literate observers often viewed
as “resistance” to colonial law and order. The two remarkable moments

4 introduction
of civil strife in 1831 and  1858 that bookend this story are also critical
to how I rethink this trajectory of resistance. I label these moments as
riots, in line with colonial parlance of the time. I also name them as upris-
ings, revolts, and rebellions interchangeably to indicate that they were wide-
spread and prolonged, attracted many participants, targeted the white
establishment as well as rival laborers on occasion, and threatened the
social hierarchy embodied in property and enforced by law.10 Ultimately
I complicate the concept of resistance, in both mundane and spectacular
forms, by pointing out its unintended and restrictive consequences for
oppressed communities.11 The narrative of valiant and unified subaltern
struggles against domination by the powerful, while recognizable and
seductive, does not account for the range of acts chronicled in this book,
which in this chaotic period were as ambiguous as they were courageous.
While freedpeople constantly tried to protect their own interests,
their efforts were not always clear-cut acts of opposition to power and
did not always advance the broader cause of social justice. Black work-
ing people did not consistently subvert the control of colonial elites,
as becoming free embedded them even more deeply in the structures
of colonial domination. The end of enslavement prompted new forms
of accountability to the state, Christian missions, and employers. At the
same time, freedpeople tried—often in vain—to force that account-
ability to flow reciprocally by becoming engaged with colonial law and
the public sphere. They acted on an unfulfilled hope that the Crown and
local authorities would accept or even facilitate their desire to provide for
themselves and their families and to conduct their lives as they wished.
Their intermittent collusions, whether intended or not, with the same
repressive structures they at other points opposed reveal the broad scope
of black working people’s immediate practices of freedom. This book
explicates the various forms of power that framed freedom, “the shaping
quality of the power that comes to reconstruct, or make over, the lives of
the ex-slaves.”12
Freedpeople at times oppressed one another while navigating the mul-
tiple forms of oppression that abolition unleashed. The desperation
resulting from the subjugation that pervaded their public and private
lives prompted them to commit individualistic and competitive acts along
with cooperative and communal ones. People of the same race, class, or
gender, living in the same plantation or neighborhood or even within the
same family, experienced constant pressures to which they periodically
responded with violence and confusion, aimed not only at the powerful

introduction 5
but also at each other. Release from enslavement did not automatically
forge collective bonds of solidarity and struggle; rather, it linked the fates
of similarly degraded individuals. Community, when it appeared among
formerly enslaved Antiguans, did so in spite of the brutal economic, so-
cial, and political constraints of the transition from slavery to freedom.
Black working people’s efforts to improve their circumstances, whether
through collaboration or conflict with their community, still largely re-
sulted in their exclusion and degradation.
Troubling Freedom offers an unromanticized account of aspects of the
past that have remained unstudied because of the discomfort that fac-
ing them honestly entails. It recounts freedpeople’s experiences of free-
dom as a truly human, complex, and at times contradictory story of lives
conducted within the state-imposed limits of emancipation. As Juncho’s
narrative so powerfully suggests, severe material privation, black work-
ing people’s compromised volition, the treachery rife within the empty
promise of emancipation, and the chronic violence that punctuated life’s
rhythms within this plantation society all exacted a serious toll on rela-
tions between freedpeople and colonial elites, and among freed men and
women. However inconsistent their intent or results, such interactions
reveal as much about what freedpeople thought freedom meant as do
the laws, intellectual currents, and economic practices of the states and
empires that institutionally oversaw the dismantling of black bondage.

On Violence

Public disorder and individual and collective violence were crucial ele-
ments in freedpeople’s troubled pursuit of liberation. In a former slave
colony such as Antigua, the power to wield violence was critical to the
assertion of freedom. Positing violent acts as a window to freedpeople’s
politics demands recognition of the centrality of violence to political ex-
pression and social organization in societies with a history of slavery. Af-
ricans’ incorporation into colonial life in the Atlantic World was marked
by brutality at the hands of Europeans at every moment, from capture
through the process of transport, sale, and seasoning, and culminat-
ing in the toil of commodity production under the most terrorizing of
circumstances.13 From the earliest phases of European settlement in the
Caribbean, the plantation determined the structure of life for people of
all social classes. Each territory’s spatial layout, legal procedures, and
local economy were shaped by the commercial enterprise of sugar, an in-

6 introduction
dustry built on the work of a commodified, racialized, and dehumanized
labor force of Africans and their descendants. Notoriously, Caribbean
slave owners extracted greater profits from working an enslaved person
to death and purchasing a new one than from providing for a slave until
old age and creating the conditions for natural reproduction. The men-
tal, physical, and sexual abuse of Africans and their descendants fueled
the expansion of Britain’s colonial economies.
The advent of an abolitionist movement and legal emancipation did
little to change the pervasive yet casual nature of violence in Caribbean
life.14 Black working people understandably resorted to violence to
convey their grievances against the colonial state and society, not only
seizing the public platform consistently denied them but also reflecting
their sense of violence as the language of power that everyone across the
class and race spectrum readily understood. I tell a story of the violent
undercurrents of everyday living in the context of a freedom so com-
promised as to mirror slavery in endless ways. Violence punctuated in-
teractions between freedpeople and powerful whites, as shown by the
uncanny ease with which ordinary acts of survival were recast as crimes
and the swift and excessive punishments meted out to those freedpeople
deemed criminals. Brutality also underlined relations among differently
placed sets of black people during the postslavery transition, as shown
by instances of freedmen’s abuse of freedwomen and the collective as-
sault in 1858 by Antiguan working people on working people from Bar-
buda, Antigua’s sister island.
This endemic violence and coercion demonstrates that the official
version of freedom in the British Empire was in theory and in practice
a strictly bounded condition. Freedom as concocted by the state and ex-
ecuted by colonial authorities did not guarantee stability and autonomy
for black people. Rather, it amounted to a test that by design freedpeople
would never pass.15 Elites’ discourse about emancipation was rife with
assumptions about the cultural deficiencies of Afro- Caribbean people
and their inability to function as fully free participants in colonial soci-
ety.16 In elites’ minds, freedpeople were always already failures at freedom
from its very inception. Freedpeople constantly tried to expand freedom,
but in many ways, their actions instead shaped how it would fail.
While exploring the pitfalls of freedom as they affected all eman-
cipated people, the book highlights moments in which men’s and
women’s experiences diverged, exploring the gendered inequities that
emancipation intensified.17 In the British Empire, metropolitan elites

introduction 7
and Christian missionaries envisioned that abolition would remake
male subjects into waged workers, heads of nuclear households, and
(eventual) political citizens while turning women into their domesti-
cated dependents. Planters, in contrast, encouraged black women to labor
exclusively within the sugar industry, as hard as men and for lesser
wages. Freedpeople lived a different reality from elites: women were
equally present in the workforce and were substantial or sole contributors
to their household livelihoods. They engaged in a multiplicity of occupa-
tions within and beyond the sugar industry to make ends meet. Yet in
other respects, freedpeople’s ways echoed colonial gendered hierarchies,
as freedmen often asserted their dominance in freedwomen’s lives, espe-
cially through physical violence. Ideologies and practices from both inside
and outside their communities suppressed black women. Emancipation,
while falling short of all black working people’s hopes, especially failed to
free black women.

The Wider Geography of Freedom

Freedpeople’s ways of life, oppositional acts, and protracted subjection

in Antigua occurred within the context of groundbreaking changes
sweeping the entire Atlantic World in the era of abolition. Antigua’s
emancipation process remained distinctive while still fitting into the
broader trajectory of the postslavery Atlantic World. Significantly,
Antigua was the only Caribbean sugar-producing colony to reject the
apprenticeship system devised by the British Parliament to give slave
owners and their allies continued control over freedpeople’s labor and
mobility; only Bermuda and the Cayman Islands, which did not depend
on sugar plantations, also proceeded to immediate emancipation. The
apprenticeship system suspended hundreds of thousands of the em-
pire’s African-descended subjects in a liminal space between enslave-
ment and freedom from 1834 to 1838. In theory, it apprenticed former
slaves to their former owners to prepare them for free labor; in practice,
it extended their bondage, requiring them to work for a stipulated num-
ber of hours without pay in exchange for rations and housing. Although
African-descended Antiguans avoided the experience of apprenticeship,
the freedom bestowed on them remained quite restrictive.
West Indian planters and colonial legislators across the islands shared
strategies to contain and regulate freedpeople, and Antigua, the first

8 introduction
sugar island to initiate “full” freedom, offered authorities elsewhere a
model for methods used to control black working people when appren-
ticeship ended in 1838.18 This island’s history confirms that immediate
emancipation foiled authorities’ and freedpeople’s divergent objectives
as much as gradual abolition did, extending our understanding of black
life as well as colonial power in the postslavery Anglophone Caribbean.
Historians have heralded Jamaica as the economic and policy-making
center of the region and asserted that its history is essential to our un-
derstanding of British emancipation.19 Yet Antigua demonstrates the
acutely damaging effects of colonial peripherality on black working
people as they transitioned to free status. In a place as small as Antigua,
emancipation held different implications for freedpeople’s mobility,
land acquisition, socialization, and economic advancement compared
with Jamaica, where a peasantry emerged and the path to independence
from the estates, though equally impeded by poverty, was clearer.
But, despite the distinct conditions and possibilities within various
abolition processes, freedpeople in former slave societies throughout
the Americas met their emancipation without widespread access to
land, citizenship, education, stable wages, or labor rights. Troubling Free-
dom broadens our sense of the strategies for securing freedom in post-
slavery societies by complicating freedom’s definition and the sites of its
expression. Indeed, freedom rang hollow in the entire Atlantic World,
and Antigua vividly exemplifies freedpeople’s attempts to challenge free-
dom’s contradictions. The struggle for freedom from multiple forms of
degradation has animated black popular politics throughout the African
diaspora, from its beginnings in forced migration through the present.20
Emancipation constituted a crucial transition in this longer-term process.
As nations and empires shifted from slavery and into various kinds of for-
mally free labor with many embedded unfreedoms, freedpeople protected
themselves by strategically engaging this changing context. The book’s in-
vestigation of the politicized intricacies within freedpeople’s survival strat-
egies in Antigua allows us to better understand how emancipated women
and men approached the many obstacles they encountered in various
postslavery societies.
A close look at everyday life after emancipation confirms that self-
definition and community formation among Antigua’s black residents
did occur despite a milieu directly inimical to these developments. The
conferral of freedom expanded their cognizance of the racial, gender,

introduction 9
and class inequalities impeding their progress. Freedom also enabled
their efforts to undo such inequalities, the effects of which both un-
dermined and reinforced their internal hierarchies and external subju-
gation. White elites anticipated unbroken economic productivity and
social deference from blacks in response to the “gift” of emancipation.
But freedpeople troubled such visions in the ways they led their daily
lives, as they tried to create the conditions for a tangible liberation. That
freedpeople expressed their will to be free at all, however inconsistently,
remains historically significant given the harrowing circumstances that
plagued their progress.

The Hostile Context

Black working people’s senses of freedom were framed not only by their
everyday survival tactics but also by the conditions elites affixed to eman-
cipation. Understanding freedpeople’s struggles requires an exploration
of both their self-interested efforts and the hostile context within which
they had to act, which was shaped by their fraught interactions with An-
tigua’s other social groups. Local planters and their representatives, who
held steadfastly to their socioeconomic dominance, and public officials,
who advanced planters’ interests, thwarted black working people’s exer-
cise of freedom. Protestant missionaries offered freedpeople outlets for
self-improvement but also evangelized to prompt submissiveness. Con-
versations among these groups showed emancipation’s deliberate and
insuperable limits.
To white elites, the abolition of slavery did not translate into blacks’
full political or economic membership in colonial society. Antigua’s
small but powerful circle of whites believed that abolition meant only
that formerly enslaved people would be paid low wages for toiling obedi-
ently. They were only to produce sugar, the singular crop on which the
island’s entire economy hinged. According to local whites, emancipa-
tion, instead of conferring automatic rights on blacks, entailed no more
than the possibility of earning privileges in the distant future as freed-
people lived up to the state’s and colonial society’s expectations for their
public and private pursuits in their economic livelihoods, spiritual prac-
tices, and personal conduct. Emancipation was intended to refashion
African-descended slaves with strange habits and “uncivilized” culture
into westernized, Christian, and industrious subjects. The standards for
achieving this transformation, however, were exacting and undesirable

10 introduction
for freedpeople to fulfill. As freedpeople attempted to comprehend and
respond to the conditions that local and metropolitan authorities built
into abolition, whites altered those conditions to maintain their own
power.
In addition to dealing with whites, Antigua’s newly freed people had
to negotiate with the numerically small but socially visible set of middle-
class people of color, who had been born into freedom or were manumit-
ted before 1834. The leading members of this group, who were of mixed
European and African heritage, had some property and social stand-
ing, as did their counterparts in most other British Caribbean isles.21
Mixed-race middle-class Antiguans often fluctuated between advocat-
ing for the advancement of black working people as they transitioned
out of slavery and heaping as much disdain on them as did local white
elites. Their ambivalence toward freedpeople stemmed from the uncer-
tainty of their own position in Antigua’s social hierarchy. Whites viewed
people of color either as a buffer class to manage the “unruly” emanci-
pated masses or as hostile competitors who, despite their ancestry, had
the education, resources, and savvy to challenge white dominance in the
colony. Newly emancipated people could make only intermittent alliances
with this group during their quest to secure a more meaningful freedom.
Freedpeople could just as often encounter onerous demands from mixed-
race middling Antiguans that they become “civilized” subjects and
willing workers, amid the latter’s unyielding maintenance of their status
distinctions.
The complexities of Antiguan emancipation also stemmed from the
structures of and fissures within British imperial control in the Carib-
bean. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Atlantic slaveholding
states were engaged in an international dialogue about the relative
merits of enslaved versus formally free labor.22 The British, who often led
this conversation, chose to experiment with state-regulated emancipa-
tion and a wage-labor economy long advocated by many metropolitan
thinkers and policy makers. State oversight helped the empire avoid the
pitfalls of freedom achieved by force, as exemplified by Haiti’s unpre-
cedented slave-led revolution. Metropolitan and colonial authorities
agreed that emancipation should produce a tidy social order and a cheap
and willing proletariat to continue the sugar enterprise. It should not
disrupt the structures of white privilege in the West Indies.23 In turn,
local administrators managing British colonies in Antigua and across the
Caribbean crafted a freedom replete with customary and legal inequities

introduction 11
that delimited blacks’ livelihoods and blocked their progress beyond the
lowest rung of the social order.
Emancipation in theory guaranteed black working people’s bodily
freedom as individuals and freedom of contract as wage laborers. But
their extreme disadvantage relative to their employers and their severe
disfranchisement through law and social custom, which flowed from
the Caribbean’s legacy of slavery, severely limited those freedoms. It hin-
dered the formal organizing necessary to surmount these obstacles and
secure citizenship for many generations to follow. Antigua’s black work-
ing people did not gain universal adult suffrage or legalized labor unions
until a full century after abolition, which mirrors the prolonged delay in
obtaining these rights that the descendants of slaves endured through-
out the Atlantic World.24
Emancipated people’s beleaguered efforts at self-preservation after
1834 were further inhibited by the declining profitability of British Carib-
bean sugar within the world economy through the rest of the nineteenth
century. Cuba and Brazil, as slaveholding territories, brought stiff com-
petition to the English colonies, generating greater quantities of cheaper
sugar. Comparatively, British Caribbean sugar plantations were under-
capitalized and technologically outdated. Overall, from the 1840s on, the
Caribbean region found itself increasingly on the periphery of rapidly
shifting global trade networks. The centers of European empire were
moving eastward to Africa and Asia. Both increasing challenges within
the global market and Antigua’s continuous economic decline after 1834
exacerbated internal conflicts over the meaning of freedom.
All social groups had a limited range of options for their advancement
in the postslavery era, which rendered freedpeople’s struggles even more
difficult. Missionaries operated on shoestring budgets; people of color
increasingly slipped out of middle-class status and into financial and
social insecurity; planters balanced precariously on the brink of ruin—
all at the same time that black working people were even more deeply
ensnared in poverty. In such desperate times, freedpeople who encoun-
tered their supposed social superiors were often met with disdain and
suppression, as planters and local authorities criminalized their con-
duct. The island’s legislature blocked freedpeople’s search for new occu-
pations and their attempts to modify the routine of estate work through
the passage of coercive labor legislation. Missionaries policed freed-
people’s personal interactions and frequently condemned their ways of
life as unChristian. Continued pursuit of their self-interest as the sugar

12 introduction
economy plummeted made freedpeople into adversaries of the state-
sponsored emancipation project and disqualified them from citizenship.

Interrogating the Archive and Framing the Narrative

Troubling Freedom assembles many seemingly incongruous documents to

construct its detailed portrait of black working people’s besieged quest to
realize freedom. Most of the sources used in this study—including gov-
ernment correspondence among public officials in Antigua and Britain,
planters’ records and letters, missionaries’ correspondence, and local
newspapers—display ambivalence or even outright hostility to black
working people’s efforts. Such records originate from and represent the
power of colonial elites as they impeded freedpeople’s progress.25 These
sources mostly obscure the depth and heterogeneity of black thought
and action, as black voices appear in the record in brief and secondary
fashion. Without reexamining these flawed documents, however, their
stories would remain permanently silenced. Troubling Freedom explores
freedpeople’s lives and labors by inverting the perspectives of the liter-
ate observers who chronicled Antigua’s past to excavate black survival
tactics, ways of life, political beliefs, and senses of self.
The archives of the immediate pre- and post-1834 era remain distinct
from other periods in their intense focus on black life. The buildup to
and passage of emancipation in the British Empire fostered a rare visibil-
ity of black working people in the records, as white elites’ concerns about
public safety and economic productivity after 1834 bred greater scrutiny
of black communities’ ordinary affairs. Elites’ obsessive documenta-
tion of black people’s labor and public comportment formed a means
of control aimed at ensuring that emancipation maintained existent
social inequalities, but inadvertently created an abundance of informa-
tion on otherwise invisible subjects. Yet these records still share with the
broader archive of Atlantic slavery and freedom an acute lack of insight
into black working people’s interiority and their ideological perspectives
on freedom.
To examine how Antigua’s working people tried to stretch freedom’s
possibilities and circumvent its limits using such challenging sources,
I investigate the plausible politics behind their self-interested acts. The
responses such acts elicited among literate observers allow me to parse
in detail the significance of mundane black life. Elites knew all too well
that freedpeople regularly attempted to contest the status quo as they

introduction 13
lived, labored, and socialized in the towns and on rural estates. Elites’
disdain at the changes they perceived in freedpeople’s labor practices,
consumer habits, demeanor, and lifestyles provides rich evidence of
these changes as they occurred. On rare occasions, sources feature the
lives of specific freedpersons that lend particularity to the broader issues
considered in this book. But, more often than not, the study engages the
indirect and generalized ways in which freedpeople’s daily lives surface
in archival documents, retelling elites’ anxieties through a different ana-
lytical lens, as stories of black working people’s survival, aspirations for
self-determination, and ultimate frustration.
My interpretation of the sources explores the complex interplay be-
tween elite power and subaltern subversion within many aspects of co-
lonial Antiguan public and private life. In this vein, elite laments over
freedpeople’s expensive new clothing document freedpeople’s sartorial
expression of their new status and desire for a life beyond fieldwork,
but the laments also reveal notions of illegitimacy that haunted black
attempts to mimic the fashions of their social superiors. Elites’ anxi-
ety over the pervasiveness of “superstition” among freedpeople evinces
their continued adherence to obeah despite the vigor of Christian evan-
gelizing, as well as whites’ claims of black “savagery” that undercut any
efforts to assert their rights in freedom. This book extracts multilayered
connotations from the actions and interactions that elites recorded, and
it shows that there was far more to black working people’s story than has
previously been told.26
Troubling Freedom engages two interconnected scholarly conversations
central to the study of the African diaspora in the Atlantic World: the
quotidian lives and cultures of African-descended people and their ideas
about freedom. The first has been dominated by scholars of slavery, who
have debated the influence of African antecedents as against the effects,
both productive and destructive, of forced migration on the identities
and cultures of diasporic communities.27 This book does not focus on
that debate, but such scholarship has helped to shape my understand-
ing of African-descended Antiguans’ cultural identity from the 1830s on-
ward. At the time of emancipation, the island’s largely creolized freed-
people shaped their lives and cultures from a blend of West African and
European customs in a Caribbean colonial setting. After the close of the
international slave trade in the first decade of the nineteenth century
ended the steady stream of African-born slaves arriving on the island,
cultural hybridity intensified.28

14 introduction
 Exploring freedom’s meanings sheds equal light on the culture of black
working people. Just as knowledge of precolonial African cultures can il-
luminate community formation in Atlantic slavery, much can be gleaned
about diasporic people’s social worlds by examining their culture-
building practices immediately after emancipation. Troubling Freedom
reconstructs the material culture of black working people as a means to
better comprehend their concepts of freedom, which distinguishes this
book from many Atlantic postslavery studies that strictly focus on politi-
cal and economic activities. Literate elites of postslavery Antigua were
not always reliable reporters of black working people’s folkways. Yet even
with their limited knowledge of and biases against black communities,
elite observers recognized that the conferral of freedom was transforma-
tive, reverberating in all aspects of freedpeople’s lives. Indeed, to assess
who black people were becoming and how they lived in the decades after
1834 is to investigate the significance of freedom.
In engaging the second major scholarly conversation on how freed-
people themselves defined freedom, I build on the fitting characteriza-
tion of freedom as “no fixed condition but a constantly moving target.”29
Over time, black colonial subjects found their ideals of freedom increas-
ingly difficult to attain, since British imperial ideas about freedom
contracted markedly rather than continuing to expand. In Britain,
the project of freeing the slaves was begun in the late eighteenth century
by an assemblage of disparate interests, including lawmakers, evange-
lists, economists, and the literate public. Abolition served as the strategic
means to many political ends, including economic modernization and
imperial unity, that were equally if not more important than the goal of
liberating Africans.30 Upon abolition’s legal enactment by Parliament in
the 1830s, imperial reformers implemented a freedom for Caribbean en-
slaved people based on liberal, abstract notions of how proletarian work-
ers should labor and live. When freedmen and -women did not respond
as expected, colonial elites ascribed the problem to an ever-present
sense of blacks’ cultural and social “deficiencies.”31 The depressed sugar
economy from the mid-1840s onward further impaired freedpeople’s
ability to challenge freedom’s limitations. By the late 1850s, whites in
Antigua concluded that emancipation was a failure and that freedpeople
were unfit for citizenship. They were destined instead for poverty, crime,
and civil exclusion. Given the impossible circumstances freedpeople
faced from the moment of abolition, this amounted to a self-fulfilling
prophecy.

introduction 15
 Despite this predicament, black working people harbored a politi-
cal awareness bred in the context of their quotidian strategies for sur-
vival. Contrary to the opinions of whites, black working people before
and after 1834 did not enjoy their freedom primarily through “criminal”
acts. They also sought to change the colonial order by claiming rights in
accordance with their sense of the law and of themselves as Crown sub-
jects. Freedpeople’s assertions of their legal rights were based on their
belief in the law as a protector of their interests. They were developing
a “legal sensibility,” a conception of “how things ought to be and what
to do if they are not.”32 Antiguan freedpeople attempted to use colonial
law to attain their objectives despite their familiarity with its inequities.
At the same time, freedpeople persistently engaged in illicit activities in
response to the exclusionary tactics of the state and white-dominated so-
ciety. Their simultaneous legal and illegal acts took place in the yawning
gap between what they believed freedom should mean and what freedom
actually allowed. Tactics such as theft, arson, and the serial quitting of
estate employment all buttressed their efforts to expand their freedom.
The moments of open popular resistance that came in 1831 and 1858 were
forceful reiterations of the politicized conflicts and the routine violence
that marked black ordinary life in freedom.
Antigua’s moments of collective protest that challenged freedom’s
contradictions reflect a broader trend in British Caribbean history. Be-
tween 1800 and 1834, mass uprisings in Barbados in 1816, Guyana (De-
merara) in 1823, and Jamaica in 1831 were precipitated by inflammatory
ideas that slaves held about freedom and revealed to imperial authori-
ties the problems that would accompany general abolition. Almost every
colony in the Anglophone chain was rocked by violent uprisings after
1834, including riots in St. Kitts and mass strikes in Trinidad in response
to the inauguration of apprenticeship. The infamous 1865 Morant Bay
Rebellion in Jamaica, a bloody struggle with a high death toll, prompted
a drastic restructuring of British colonial governance in the Caribbean.33
Freedpeople consistently used physical aggression to express their anger
at emancipation’s many inadequacies. The divergent targets of Antiguan
black working people’s violent acts in the 1831 and 1858 uprisings, the
first instance destroying whites’ property and the second attacking other
black working people, show the stark shift between their hopefulness
on the eve of emancipation and their despair after several decades of liv-
ing with its shortcomings. Violent conflict showcased freedpeople’s re-
sponses to the conditional nature of colonial abolition, a conditionality

16 introduction
that eventually delimited their own visions of freedom and their sense of
who could share in its practice.

Charting Freedom’s Course

The language I use to tell this story of emancipated people’s frustrated

efforts before and after 1834 is deliberately chosen to highlight how race
and class, as well as gender, played critical roles in shaping Antigua’s so-
cial hierarchy and delimiting freedom. I refer to Antiguans with any Af-
rican ancestry as African-descended people because skin color was the most
salient marker of difference in the colony. Racial categories defined
distinct groups subject to white planter control. Those Antiguans who
had both African and European ancestry are termed mixed-race people,
people of color, or the mixed-race middle class, a status held by the leading
members of this stratum. I refer to Antiguans of European ancestry as
whites or as white elites, which indicates the economic and social control
over the colony’s aff airs exercised by prominent planters and officials.
I also call white and mixed-race middle-class observers elites to denote
these two groups’ shared demand that slaves-turned-freedpeople adopt
“civilized” ways and act in accordance with elite conceptions of law and
order.
For the period prior to 1834, I call the historical actors most central to
my study slaves or enslaved people. For the period after 1834, I refer to these
women and men as freedpeople, newly freed people, or emancipated people to
signify the paramount importance of emancipation in their daily lives. I
also call them black working people to connote their racial and class status in
the colony while still centering their humanity.34 In contrast, the sources
show British colonial officers, planters, missionaries, and other literate
white and mixed-race observers calling them laborers, Negroes, or, later,
the peasantry. The European term peasant especially did not apply to the
condition of black working people on this island. Lack of access to land
and the dominance of sugar planting prevented Antigua’s freedpeople
from practicing the independent subsistence and commercial agricul-
tural production that characterizes a peasantry. At best, Antigua had a
semipeasantry, with a significant proportion of people pursuing multiple
occupations, combining small-scale provisioning with employment in
the sugar industry or other jobs in the parishes and towns.35 Elites’ use
of this misnomer rings ironic in light of their endeavors to prevent
black working people’s self-sufficiency and independence from the

introduction 17
sugar industry. The term also signifies the misfortunes of black working
people enduring a freedom that functioned too much like slavery.
Chapter 1 begins with an overview of the social, spatial, and legal con-
tours of colonial Antigua and Barbuda in the late slavery period. This
chapter orients readers to the geography, topography, and demography
of both places, and the racial and gendered boundaries circumscribing
enslaved people’s lives and forms of subversion. Chapter 2 examines An-
tigua’s 1831 slave rebellion, in which enslaved people protested the out-
lawing of their Sunday market with riots in the capital and a series of fires
across several rural estates. This uprising shows that metropolitan and
colonial conversations about slavery’s political future affected slaves’ ap-
proaches to their daily lives.
The events considered in subsequent chapters illuminate both conti-
nuities and changes in black people’s everyday practices as they sought
to define the terms of their freedom. While their new status bestowed
new opportunities, crucial pitfalls of bondage remained well after aboli-
tion. Chapter  3 examines the transformations in labor after abolition.
Working people contested the official version of freedom through infor-
mal and often extralegal negotiations with their employers over issues
such as wages, work schedules, workplace duties, the labor of women
and children, and the pursuit of livelihoods beyond the plantations.
Freedpeople’s growing mobility and refashioned work routines prompted
planters and lawmakers to respond with severe legal and customary strat-
egies of containment.
Chapter 4 investigates black working people’s changing leisure prac-
tices as opportunities in the local marketplace expanded, their wages on
and off plantations rose (however temporarily), and they asserted their
presence in public space in novel ways. Freedpeople’s pursuit of improved
housing, expanded amusements, and new forms of consumption an-
nounced their conviction that freedom should also transform their
social lives. But their new religious and secular public engagements
opened up further subjection to church and state authority, and were
met with sharp criticism from local elites that reiterated discourses of
race, class, and gender in operation since slavery.
The next chapter first documents the surge in Christian conversion
among freedpeople amid their continued adherence to the African spiri-
tual practice of obeah, and then explores the prevalence of nonmonog-
amous informal partnerships over Christian wedlock, both of which
complicate any assumptions about freedpeople’s complete Christian-

18 introduction
ization. Drawing on hitherto unstudied archival records of Moravian
Church disciplinary proceedings against what they deemed adulterous
relations, the chapter argues that emancipation as a gendered project
intensified the inequities of slavery to which black women were espe-
cially subject. These proceedings reveal the regularity of surveillance and
violence aimed at freedwomen’s bodies and their sexuality, as it was dif-
ferently practiced by Christian missionaries and by the black men with
whom they were intimate. Black women’s bodies were continually under
duress. Legal abolition and the varied efforts to expand freedom after-
ward particularly generated little in the way of liberation for black working
women.
Chapter  6 investigates the successive and severe setbacks to black
working people’s progress between the late 1840s and mid-1850s. The
Sugar Duties Act of 1846 that gradually eliminated protection for British
Caribbean sugar in the English market depressed sugar prices and pre-
cipitated a financial crisis. Amid such dire circumstances, black working
people employed a variety of legal and extralegal strategies to maintain
livelihoods both within and outside the sugar industry. Setting cane fires,
practicing obeah, and committing petty theft—though deemed criminal
by authorities and white elites—appear to have had more economic and
political significance than their detractors recognized. These illicit
actions represent freedpeople’s protest against the retraction of the all-
too-brief benefits they had gained during the early 1840s.
Chapter 7 tells the story of the 1858 uprising. Job competition between
Antiguan and Barbudan dockworkers sparked the outburst. Over sev-
eral days, Antiguans progressed from attacking Barbudans to targeting
Portuguese immigrant retailers, white planters, and, most prominently,
black and mixed-race policemen. Gendered violence also unfolded as
Antiguan workingwomen assaulted Barbudan women in ways reflecting
the pervasive devaluation of black women’s bodily integrity in slavery and
in freedom. The rioters’ goals and the changing targets of their violence
hint at their varied and contradictory conceptions of freedom and who
should enjoy its privileges. Ultimately, Antigua’s working people launched
a futile protest against such a narrowly construed freedom.
Troubling Freedom presents freedpeople’s efforts to form an efficient
workforce, devout families, and independent communities in response
to elite prescriptions for acceptable behavior, all of which failed to con-
vince whites that blacks were worthy of full economic and political inclu-
sion in the colony. Freedpeople’s multifaceted conceptions of freedom

introduction 19
are revealed in their shifting yet persistent responses to white elites’
strategies of domination. As emancipation unfolded in the early 1830s,
Antigua’s freedpeople appealed to colonial structures of power to try to
claim their perceived rights, invoking their perceived legal subjecthood
before the Crown. They continued during the late 1830s and early 1840s
by asserting their rights as laborers and as participants in public institu-
tions. At later and more repressive junctures, they had to abandon their
new strategies altogether and employ familiar practices to maintain their
lives and livelihoods. Freedom degenerated to a bare minimum of sur-
vival as sugar’s profitability declined during the late 1840s. In turn, the
legal and public identities black working people cultivated fell away as
they continued the extralegal tactics in which they had always engaged.
Moreover, some freedpeople’s efforts to secure material improvement
and social power undercut those of others. As a wide range of efforts
proved inadequate to expand local and metropolitan authorities’ narrow
constructions of freedom, freedpeople struggled against one another,
sometimes violently, to seize what little spoils they could. By the 1850s,
the idealism that had flourished on the eve of emancipation was all but
gone.
Ultimately, this book explores the contentious nature of black commu-
nity building, asking how it simultaneously supported and derailed the
goals that working people pursued in freedom, and how it was repeatedly
thwarted by the empire’s powerful Others. Though they launched many
oppositional efforts that upend a simple narrative of imperial subjuga-
tion after slavery, freedpeople still reified the troubled forms of freedom
embedded in Britain’s emancipation project. This contradictory and dy-
namic range of activities offers a rare window into black working people’s
lives and their politics.

20 introduction